Everyone’s a critic (unedited)

The UNEDITED VERSION:



For the Love of Movies:
The Story of American Film Criticism
Written and directed by Gerald Peary. Produced by Amy Geller. Original Score by Bobby B. Keyes. Narrated by Patricia Clarkson. 80 minutes, released in 2009.

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Approximately halfway through For the Love of Movies (2009), Gerald Peary’s documentary about American film critics and criticism, we hear the old chestnut about Bosley Crowther and his departure from the New York Times. He’d been reviewing movies there for a quarter of a century, “a good liberal and a good Democrat” as Molly Haskell remembers him in regard to his anti-McCarthyism and support for the right causes. But he was sadly adrift when it came to the unorthodox directions the cinema had taken during the 1960s. The axe fell with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Disturbed by its choreographed violence and playful attitudinizing, he attacked it in the Times:

“[The film’s] blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and [Warren] Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap.”

    While over at The New Yorker, one of their new writers, Pauline Kael had a firm handle on its radical values. Her famous (and quite lengthy) review helped to bury not just Mr. Crowther, but also an entire generation’s outmoded approach to viewing and critiquing, at the same time making her a formidable presence and the picture a hit:

“Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate… The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours — not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other movies — go too far for some tastes — and Bonnie and Clyde divides audiences, as The Manchurian Candidate did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard.”

    Jump ahead forty-two years to 2009, Peary resting his eye on Harry Knowles, the online movie critic who is read, we’re told, “by two and a half million people every day” on the website Ain’t It Cool News. In less than eloquent terms, Knowles outlines a similar rift currently percolating ‘neath his radar. “When you have a film like Fight Club, there’s a straight divisional shift in terms of generation,” he says with pokerfaced arrogance. “The older film critics thought that it was nonsensical that you need violent conflict to become a man. This new generation saw the movie as an experience.” On film director Michael Bay and Armageddon, Knowles subscribes to the sweeping generalization that “old guard critics despise” the director, whereas “to a younger generation of film critics, it’s not nonsensical editing. They can see where he’s going.”

    Crusty old geezer that I am, I’d like to think I can comprehend Armageddon’s mise-en-scène, just as I’m not entirely feebleminded when it comes to Fight Club. More to the point, this is an example of history repeating. But unlike the upheaval instigated by Kael and Andrew Sarris and their coterie forty years ago, when intellectualism became, for lack of a better word, trendy and decimated a simplistic old guard, today’s switch in critical values lends itself to anarchy. The critics of the 1960s endeavored to teach and enlighten; Knowles professes ageism, privatization and poor grammar. While it’s true that, once upon a time, ‘anyone’ could be a film critic — newspapers and magazines didn’t ask to see your diploma but they were selective about what they printed — today’s internet is a free for all, where everyone can be a critic with a click of the mouse.

Gerald Peary

    Subtitled “The Story of American Film Criticism,” For the Love of Movies positions Kael and Sarris at its center. The stuff of legend, their juicy public rivalry unraveled over thirty years, a tale that could easily fill the entire eighty minutes of this movie. Which brings us to one problem that may be unavoidable and unsolvable: For the Love of Movies is too short. By tracing the history of film criticism back to its roots and all the way up to current conditions, Peary shortchanges the contributions of several excellent writers. I assume his intentions had less to do with literary profiling than with a sincere desire to honor his peers and profession. A weekly columnist for the Boston Phoenix since 1996, Peary has had articles published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and most of the major film magazines for over twenty years.

    He may feel anchored to Kael and Sarris — they’re certainly at the heart of why film criticism flourished from the mid 1960s through the ‘70s — but the significance of their predecessors is undervalued by the film. Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber and James Agee are acknowledged in interviews with Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann and Richard Schickel, but their creative and beautiful prose (especially Agee’s) deserve far more time than is allotted here.

    Watching it, I wondered if there’s a market for a comprehensive, multi-part documentary on film criticism, the kind of extended format Ken Burns used for the Civil War and baseball. It’s doubtful, especially considering that the number of employed newspaper and magazine critics continues to drop at an alarming rate. Peary prefaces For the Love of Movies with the grim news that twenty-eight of his colleagues had lost their jobs when he made the film, a figure that has easily doubled since its release. (As I write this, Todd McCarthy has just been let go from Variety after thirty-one years.)

    You could blame it on the poor economy or the twisting evolution of cultural values, or both. Today it’s not the same world as it was when Sarris first popularized the auteur approach of the French; when new pictures by Antonioni, Bergman, Kurosawa, Buñuel and Truffaut were arriving regularly; when reevaluations of Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock and Welles demanded their older films be seen anew with fresh eyes; when Penn, Cassavetes, Altman, Scorsese, De Palma and Coppola pioneered the New American Cinema. When all of it was in glorious 35mm, the specter of home video looming far off in the future, when the small, lifeless eye of television was dismissed by purists. Since closed, the so-called art houses and revival theatres were multiplying in cities, college towns and suburban hamlets, cinemaphilia growing into a genuine community event. Heady times, when a film critic could become something of a superstar in any one of the dozens of papers, periodicals and fanzines flooding a hungry market. When a Ken Burns-length mini-series about criticism could not only get made, but be watched.

    The war of words between Kael and Sarris placed their followers in separate camps, the Sarrisites and the Paulettes. (She initially dismissed the auteur theory as “silly, dangerous and anti-art,” but later reversed her position and became one of its chief proponents.) Peary interviews Richard Schickel about the rivalry, who clumsily inserts himself into the fray: “Pauline and Andy and I,” he says earnestly, “looked at movies in a kind of amoral way. We [my underline] were just movie people.” Truth be told, Schickel’s critical authority at the time was nominal at best. Better known as an historian, he’d authored books about studios and genres, star biographies, and documentaries on film history for television. During the Kael-Sarris skirmish, Schickel was the movie critic at Life and Time, no hotbeds of cerebral discourse. Peary could have seized the opportunity, but diplomacy won out and Schickel’s “Pauline and Andy and I” fantasy goes unchallenged. Playing it perhaps too safe, For the Love of Movies sidesteps the very controversies that can make the world surrounding film criticism so intoxicating.

    If anyone hovered near Kael and Sarris, it would’ve been either Dwight MacDonald or John Simon. A silver-tongued devil who constantly raised the ire of his readers, Simon was famously distracted by any given actor’s physical appearance. He once reviewed a Barbra Streisand movie from the point of her nose: “[it] cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning.” Peary’s failure to mention MacDonald and Simon is a shortsighted blunder compounded by the absence of William Wolf, Judith Crist, Archer Winston and Peter (“smart, hip, sexy!”) Travers, some of the most prominent names ever associated with movie ad pullquotes.

    These omissions can be maddening if you’re passionate about this stuff. What saves Peary’s picture depends on how much of that passion you bring to it. I doubt that anyone who’s deeply into film would find For the Love of Movies anything less than engrossing. It taps into cinemaphilia, an addiction that surely includes stargazing, which isn’t limited to gawking at the people who make movies. Critics often transcend the traditional definitions of celebrity; some have, as the saying goes, faces made for radio. But they can be our heroes or our villains, through prose that’s apt to touch us intimately and dramatically. Like skillful politicians or crafty salespeople, they have the power to guide and change the minds of the fiercely opinionated.

    I don’t know what footage of Kael was available to use. She died in 2001, and is remembered here respectfully but coolly by Sarris, Richard Corliss and John Powers; the clips of her interviewed or holding court on television talk shows and the brief passage of her work read by Patricia Clarkson underline the haughty superciliousness which too often colored public opinion of her. Elvis Mitchell remembers mailing samples of his work to Kael when he was a student, and the lengthy, handwritten reply she sent in return. The ambiguity here makes it difficult to determine whether he received it with gratitude or took umbrage at her editorial suggestions.

    Sarris lends himself freely to Peary’s camera, and it’s a pleasure to go with him down memory lane. His humble demeanor and reluctance of the internet distances Sarris from the new guard, who would do well to study this brilliant essayist. The appearance of Stanley Kauffmann was an unexpected and welcome surprise, and he, too, is in no shortage of anecdotes. Of the other interviewees, Owen Gleiberman is energetic; Michael Wilmington appears forlorn; John Powers looks delighted to be there; J. Hoberman doesn’t get enough screen time; and Molly Haskell, as striking and tantalizing and hard as a diamond, could never be on the screen long enough, for my money. Roger Ebert is interviewed before illness struck, when his vitality and enthusiasm were unmatched. Clips of him with Gene Siskel during their very first television programs are a hoot: slow, soft spoken and quite hairy, the post-hippie pair look like stand-ins for Brewer & Shipley. Those scant few minutes made me realize how much I miss Gene Siskel.

    Most of them share why and how they became critics (blind luck for some, a life’s dream for others), and the movies which affected them personally (Diabolique for Haskell, Two Thousand Maniacs! for Mitchell). Peary tiptoes near and around the internet. It’s a monster that’ll determine the future of film criticism while it supplants print media. Karina Longworth brings up an intriguing point about her online film reviews: “What I say is just the start of a conversation,” referring to the comments left by readers. Some are learned, some not; some are anonymous, others are posted by internet hotshots with followings. She realizes that “critics don’t have authority anymore at all,” a fact that can sting any wordsmith prideful of their craft.